More than two days after experiencing a complete outage as a result of a distribute denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, Twitter and other social networking sites such as Facebook are still battling a surge in traffic related to the attack. Twitter has taken some steps to mitigate the spike in traffic and ensure that the site is not knocked offline again, but some of those steps are having an impact on third-party tools that link to Twitter through API’s (application programming interface).Evidence gathered thus far from Twitter and other sites targeted by the DDoS attacks seems to suggest that the attack is actually a politically motivated attack aimed at silencing a Georgian activist. The victim, known by the online handle Cyxymu, uses blogs and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to express views related to the tensions between Russia and Georgia. In a blog post, Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer of Internet security firm F-Secure, said “Launching DDoS attacks against services like Facebook is the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters.

To defend itself against the ongoing DDoS attack, Twitter has implemented various defensive actions, some of which are blocking third-party Twitter applications from being able to connect with Twitter API’s. The mitigating steps are also affecting the ability of many users to post to their Twitter accounts via SMS (short message service) text messages.